Abstract:
The location of this paper is early childhood education in so-called 'multicultural' Oslo. Third year students involved in related field work projects produce reports, data and ideas to develop their own practices as (pre)school teachers and carers. Many of these students have first-hand experiences of being positioned differently, within a dominant White Norwegian-speaking society. The teacher/lecturers who work in this field have variously taken up relationships to 'the other', 'the foreign' and 'the multiple'. So, it appears, have postgraduate students doing the 'Multicultural Studies' Masters Degree offered on campus; though the 'Early Childhood Pedagogy' Masters students have not. The paper works theoretically to investigate ethnic shift, changing contexts, reconstructions and transformations. Beyond assimilations and integrations, what matters are newer theories and critical perspectives. Here a critical multiculturalism (May, 1999) develops anti-racisism, and ethnic identities involve dialectics of similarlity and difference (Jenkins, 1997).